Scorched Earth with Jonathan Crary

<p><a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/3965-scorched-earth" target="_blank"><strong>Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World</strong></a></p> <p><br></p> <p>In this uncompromising essay, <strong>Jonathan Crary</strong> presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our ‘digital age’ is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialisation of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terro<strong>r. </strong><em><strong>Scorched Earth</strong></em> surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support.<br> <br> This polemic by the author of <em>24/7</em> dismantles the presumption that social media could be an instrument of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life.</p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>Jonathan Crary</strong> is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University and is a founding editor of Zone Books. His publications include <em>Techniques of the Observer</em>, <em>Suspensions of Perception</em> and <em>24/7.</em></p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>PRAISE:</strong></p> <p><br></p> <p>“At last a book about the urgency to find a way out from a system that has crossed a threshold of irreparability and toxicity. A book that is simultaneously desperate and refreshing.” – <strong>Franco “Bifo” Berardi</strong></p> <p>“Following on <em>24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep</em>, Jonathan Crary here confirms his position as our most ruthless critic of all that exists. With a hammer of critical theory, he smashes the golden calf around which our lives revolve: the very internet itself. His sentences come packed with urgent truths long felt but only now articulated with the force they deserve. His clear-sightedness is the gift of prophets.”